Topic summary
Spin glasses
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Spin glass.
Spin glasses and the complex internal structures that arise within them are termed "metastable" because they are "stuck" in stable configurations other than the lowest-energy configuration (which would be aligned and ferromagnetic). While difficult, the study of spin glasses has yielded valuable results in fields outside of physics, including chemistry, computer science and neural networks, pure mathematics, complex systems science, and even sociology.